Florida Men Are Sniffing Your Ballots!

And other California voting conspiracy theory scandals.

Ready for the conspiracizing! (Photo by Jesse Paul on Unsplash)

There are multiple ballot thingies going down in California, and I, your Most Excellent Wonkette California Correspondent, am here to explain the ballot thingies and the conspiracy theories coming everybody’s way to you!

California has a reputation for being progressive and filled with loony left-wingers, but it’s actually a really big and populous state. We just happen to have a lot more people here than just about any other state, which means we have a lot more loony left-wingers and progressives than just about any other state.

It also means, unfortunately, that we have a lot more far-right freaks than people outside California might have you believe. The California Klan, née White Aryan Resistance, whose acolytes personally ensured early in my existence that I would hate Nazis and all their ilk for the rest of my life and dedicate all my time to stamping those fuckers out, still exists here for a reason! And they have lots of friends!

And all these far-right freaks are going completely ham on these ballots.

At least there has been a consequence or two. For example, Oath Keepering pest Chad Bianco, the Riverside County Sheriff-Coroner (argh), seized hundreds of thousands of 2025 ballots, which the California Supreme Court just ruled is unlawful, and I should hope so, too!

It’s all happening around Proposition 50, the one that applies new, Legislature-drawn congressional boundaries in California through 2030. Voters approved Prop 50 with 64 percent of the vote in a 2025 special election, which Chadly said was suspicious, so he sent a bunch of jackbooted thugs over to steal sensitive information from election workers, illegally!

“I would underscore the seriousness of the violation here. This is not a case involving a few documents,” wrote Associate Justice Goodwin H. Liu in a concurrent opinion published Thursday. “It involves the unlawful removal and handling by armed deputies of over 1,000 boxes of documents — and not just any documents, but the most precious documents of the citizenry in a democracy: their votes.”

Unfortunately, QAnon Chad has not been deterred, per the same New York Times story, telling reporters after the ruling:

“This is about an attorney general who believes that he can stop an investigatory process into something that he doesn’t want us to know the answer to, and that was not the intention of our founding fathers. […] That was not the intention of the writers of our Constitution.”

Oh for God’s sake, shut up.

Meanwhile, up in Shasta County, which seems to have gone full-blown Jefferson State at this point, the FBI apparently paid the registrar of voters, Clint Curtis, a visit.

In the Before Times, and even a little into the After Times, I would have been going “oh ho ho ho, these grifters sure are in trouble now!” But now, in the time of Kash Patel and the embarrassing cringe of the DOGE boys hollowing out our entire government at the behest of an inbred-looking yarpie trust-fund dork, I am not so certain it’s going to go entirely well for our great state. I hope to be wrong, especially since I am watching so many quiet reversals and fleeing rats, but I have also seen some real long-shot bullshit take hold as policy!

So a little more about this Curtis guy. First of all, he’s a Florida attorney with no relevant experience. He was appointed in 2025 by known far-right members of the Shasta County election board. And now he’s talking about sniffing ballots, which I don’t think is a good sign under any circumstances!

“We had a lot of weird ballots coming in, so we have the whole counterfeit ballot thing, which is what the feds are looking at, which is essentially the fact that the paper is wrong,” Curtis said in an hourlong interview with CalMatters in the Redding elections office. “And it smelled wrong before, but now it doesn’t smell anymore. Two months have gone by, but when we did our first initial — you know, I had a dozen people say ‘Something’s wrong with this.’ When you’re flipping through ballots, you kind of get used to the thickness and the size, and suddenly you hit one that’s, you know, considerably thicker.”

That’s just two ballots stuck together by the grease on your palms, Clint. At least I hope that’s grease!

Okay, to be serious for a second here, this may sound like he just made it up in his weird little cooked Florida Man brain, but just like every other weird little creep spouting off this sort of anti-democratic horseshit, this is actually him repeating a conspiracy theory that has been around for years and perpetuated by bad people who know that if you repeat a lie long enough, other people start to believe it. Remember QAnon and all the bullshit nonsense they spread about “secret watermarks,” and “multiple counts” and the other, weirder narratives?

Here’s a refresher on some of the more common ones, in case you need one:

• Underaged, undocumented, or somehow felonious voters are casting votes en masse, for Democrats!

• Satellites from [Italy, Ukraine, Canada, etc.] helped steal votes!

• Red-blooded American votes for Republicans are being CHANGED to pussy foreign DEMOCRAT votes by the machines, or poll workers, or whatever!

• The ballots feel, look, or smell different therefore they are being invalidated!

Well guess what? Conspiracy theories recur, like malaria! So now, of course, they are being applied to the California vote for Prop 50, and now that there’s been an actual court ruling, they are probably about to really take off.

Consider this your warning in advance that the most annoying people that you can’t shake from your life are suddenly going to be very concerned with election security. If that happens, kindly explain to them that they are repeating bullshit weaponized narratives that come up around every election in order to enable people who hate democracy to get their way.

And then show them this message from me:

YOU CREDULOUS DIPSHIT.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.